There are two ways to buy likes for a Facebook page, Muller explains. You can buy them illegally from "like farms" in developing countries or you can pay Facebook to promote your page.

Either way you do, Muller explains, the result is the same: Lots of likes from developing countries that don't lead to much engagement with your Facebook page. He theorizes that the "click farms," that are getting paid to like pages are also liking pages for free in an effort to make themselves seem less obvious.

More incendiary: Muller claims Facebook knowingly profits off the fake likes in both cases.

Facebook vehemently denies Muller's claims and says it is constantly working to weed fake likes out of the news feed.

"Fake likes don’t help us. For the last two years, we have focused on proving that our ads drive business results and we have even updated our ads to focus more on driving business objectives," wrote a spokesperson in an email. "Those kinds of real-world results would not be possible with fake likes."